Assuming everyone is up to speed on the essential facts surrounding the Kinderhook plates, let's look at my theory.
First, a question. What was the source of the content for the ho-e-oop-hah description contained in the GAEL? I would suggest the prime candidate is the very document Joseph had in his possession and had focused some attention on: the Hor Book of Breathings. I would also suggest that this association is what caused William Clayton to mistakenly claim the Kinderhook Plates were found on the breast of a skeleton, and that Clayton may have been confused by what Joseph told him, i.e. three documents were being discussed - Kinderhook Plates, GAEL, and Book of Breathings - but the Kinderhook Plates and Book of Breathings would not have been called by the names we know them by today. Instead, they were likely referred to with similar words like "record," "characters," "symbols," "history," "artifact," "discovery," "ancient," "Egyptian," etc. and Clayton may have conflated some details.
As we can see in the following image, the Hor Book of Breathings contains all the content of the ho-e-oop-hah description (click to enlarge):
I have not been able to find any record of Clayton ever mentioning the papyri. He was certainly aware of the papyri, however he missed out on the initial excitement. The papyri arrived in 1835; Clayton joined the Church in 1837, and emigrated to America in 1840, when the Saints had many other concerns and the papyri was not a primary focus. It's quite possible Clayton did not know many of the details.
Okay, so William Clayton very likely based his personal journal entry, about Joseph Smith translating a portion of the Kinderhook Plates, on a discussion he had with Joseph Smith himself, regarding the GAEL's boat-like "ho-e-oop-hah" and the description associated with it.
However, Clayton's journal entry does not completely add up. Clayton said the plates were on the breast of a skeleton, which is wrong. Clayton said the plates were found in Adams County, which is wrong. Clayton said the skeleton was "nine foot high," which is wrong. So at the very least, we know Clayton was not being a stickler for accuracy in this particular situation. He was excited about the discovery of the plates, and maybe in his personal journal he took the liberty of jotting down tentative info as though it were fact.
So, I don't take for granted that Clayton's portrayal of Joseph conducting a Kinderhook Plate translation is strictly matter-of-fact and without any assumptions or misunderstandings on Clayton's part. For instance, Clayton wrote that Joseph Smith said the plates "contain the history of the person with whom they were found." But did Joseph really claim to know that to be a fact? Joseph could not have known it through divine revelation, since the Kinderhook Plates were, after all, a hoax. And he couldn't have known it from the ho-e-opp-hah GAEL entry, since the GAEL entry makes no claims about documents being found with anyone. The plates were just a physical object which in theory could have been found with anyone. Nephi had brass plates too, but the writing on them was not about him. Moreover, Joseph knew from his personal experience with buried plates that the reasons for burying plates can be complicated.
When Joseph showed Clayton the boat-shaped character on the GAEL, and compared it with the boat-shaped character on the Kinderhook plate, it's easy to see how differently Joseph and Clayton might have interpreted the situation. To Joseph, the seasoned translator, the matching characters may have represented an encouraging sign of authenticity, meriting further inquiry. While to the excited Clayton, the matching characters, along with the description in the GAEL, may have represented a clear translation. Evidence of this difference between Joseph and Clayton is in the letter from "A Gentile," who confirms that Joseph found characters that matched, but goes on to say that Joseph "therefore will be able to decipher them." The future-tense seems to indicate that Joseph had not moved from authentication to translation. And this was a week after Clayton's journal entry. This is also supported by Wilber Fugate's claim that Joseph "would not agree to translate them until they were sent to the Antiquarian society at Philadelphia, France, and England." Also, this is consistent with the Willard Richards account, which does not indicate anything so eventful.
So, just how plausible is it that a person could be confused about ancient records? Well, Bradley may have helped answer this question already, when the FAIR Mormon audience seemed to accept Bradley's casual suggestion that "A Gentile" had confused the Book of Mormon with the Book of Abraham - and that "A Gentile" did so in a prepared letter to a major newspaper, which we might imagine "A Gentile" put some thought into. As for critics who might suggest that only a FAIR Mormon audience would accept the plausibility of anyone confusing artifacts, I would remind them that one of the actual Kinderhook Plates sat in a museum, falsely labeled as one of the Gold Plates from the Book of Mormon!
Which leads us back to Clayton saying Joseph talked about the plates having a history of "the person with whom they were found" and Clayton saying the plates were "on the breast of the skeleton," none of which makes sense in the context of the fraudulent Kinderhook Plates, but makes perfect sense if we are talking about the Book of Breathings.
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